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September 2023 ยป thefivestar.com 75 September 2023 M E M B E R S H I P S P O T L I G H T Especially since REO is so different now. I'm in Florida, so I know REOs are down every- where, but in Florida it's really down because the investors are picking up everything before it gets to that point. So, since it's so scarce, being able to interface with those people again was a good thing. Q: You mentioned you've been doing this for a while now, and you've been through the financial crisis in 2008. Working in REO now, what's your top advice for working this sector? What got me into REO years and years ago before the market, I actually got into it prior to the market tanking. The way I did that is I just started doing other types of opportunities like broker price opinions. I actually do property field inspections. I do draw inspections for construction work and all those different kinds of things. It gets your name out there. You're handing out a busi- ness card to people, that can actually drum up other business just because you're out in the sector meeting people. The best example I have is what I actually do for Clear Capital. I do work with them, and they do these property scans for Fannie Mae-backed loans. I was just out at one the other day, and you run across the whole gamut. Literally, the house I was at two days ago, it was probably a $2 million house, beautiful home, formally owned by a local tech executive, and then the next day I was at a hoarder house. So, you see everything, and you cross paths with all sorts of people. But yeah, definitely that kind of work has helped me. Years ago, since I was doing that work, that's when an asset manager had reached out to me because they'd seen my name on the reports, so therefore they reached out to me when they needed help. That's another thing I would suggest people do, too: don't cherry-pick. If you get an opportunity to take a property, if it's not a great area, you don't think you're going to make much money on it, take it anyway. That's what got me in with Wells Fargo years ago. "We're all trying to get our foot in the door with different servicers, but just to be able to talk to people and to see their side of it and what they experience, that's a good thing."